Transcription
We all collect souvenirs. Souvenirs from our trips. Souvenirs from our working places. Souvenirs from our relationships. I don't want to sound creepy, but we all have them. Aid memoirs, memory aids. We all have objects, photographs, recordings that assist us in dredging up long-term memory and converting it into a vivid form of short-term memory. Of course, if this process becomes involuntary, what we have is emotional disregulation. We're overwhelmed by emotions and the memories attached to them, or in very extreme cases, flashbacks, when we cannot tell the difference between memory and reality. So what, what is so different about psychopaths, sexual sadists, serial killers, narcissists? When these people collect trophies, when they assemble, uh, *mementos*, why do we say that their actions, their choices, the objects that they accumulate are pathological? What is sick in what they're doing? What's the difference between having a lock of hair of a beloved one and a lock of hair of the victim of rape and murder? This is the topic, the morbid topic of today's video. My name is Sakn. I'm the author of *Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited*, and I'm a professor of psychology.
Psychopaths, serial killers, sexual sadists, and narcissists—they all collect mementos and trophies. It is the motivation behind these collections and, of course, the nature of the collections that render these activities manifestly pathological, sick, morbid, and dark. These people all have a disrupted sense of self, a disrupted self-concept. They don't really feel alive; it's as if they're dead inside, and they spend their entire lives trying to convince themselves that they do exist. It is as if, in the absence of drama, or in the absence of hurting others, or in the absence of disruption and mayhem and chaos, these people don't feel alive. They need, they need to introduce into the human environment a lot of fear, a lot of pain, as I said, a lot of drama. But all this is done in order to prove to themselves that they do exist, that this all-pervading, all-consuming, all-subsuming feeling that they are somehow not real, somehow an imitator, somehow some kind of simulation—they're trying to overcome this. They also have lingering suspicions that they may be not entirely normal, so they're trying to prove to themselves that they are normal.
These twin motivations—the drive to collect evidence of one's own existence and the drive to prove to oneself and to others that one's life, one's personality are totally normal—this drive to normality and drive to existence, or the experience of existence, these are the twin drives behind narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and in extreme forms, behind people who become serial killers. Now, the trophies and mementos that healthy, normal people accumulate, collect over a lifetime, they are linked to memories and to emotions. So when you have a memento or a trophy from a trip abroad, it brings up the memories of the trip and the emotions that you have experienced while you were traveling. That's in a healthy setting. With these sick individuals, the mementos and trophies do not represent memories; they're not linked to memories, or at the very least, not directly linked to memories and not mainly linked to memories. Memory is an afterthought, a side effect. The mementos and the trophies are linked to other people. Psychopaths, serial killers, sexual sadists, narcissists, pedophiles, and so on—they collect people; they don't collect memories. They have problems with memory; they have memory gaps and dissociation. They don't collect emotions; they don't *do* emotions; they have no access to positive emotions, only to negative ones. So these are not the main drivers and motivators in the accumulation of trophies and mementos. In these cases, the main thing is the individuals from whom the trophies and mementos were taken—not the act of taking, but the victims. The mementos and the trophies are what is known as a *synecdoche*. A synecdoche is when a part represents the whole. We have this situation in fetishism, where a body part or a fashion accessory represents an entire human being. The sexual attraction of the fetishist is towards this synecdoche, towards this part that represents the whole. Similarly, trophies and mementos in mentally ill people represent the victims. It's a part of the victim—an item of clothing, a body part, um, hair, um, fashion accessory, something to do with the victim. But this object that is linked to the victim does not represent a memory of the events or of the victim or of the interaction with the victim. It represents the victim itself. It encapsulates and reifies and embodies the victim. It's as if when a psychopath or a serial killer or a sexual sadist or a narcissist or a pedophile holds the trophy in his hand, when he or she places the memento on the shelf, they are actually capturing, encapsulating the victim himself or herself. It's like trapping an ant in amber. The victim is trapped in the object, in the memento, in the trophy, in totality. The victim's total being is embedded in the trophy or in the memento, as far as the sick individual is concerned. And that's, of course, very reminiscent of psychic mediums. When you go to a psychic medium, she would tell you, or he would tell you, "Give me an item of clothing, give me some object that used to belong to the person," and they touch this object, and then they're able to communicate with the person because the person *is* the object. So if you come to a psychic medium and you say, "You know, I would like to communicate with a deceased loved one," she would tell you, "Give me her, uh, purse, or give me her handkerchief," and she would touch the handkerchief or the purse or the shoes or whatever, and through the object she would make contact with a person who used to own the object. It's the same, exactly the same state of mind of the perpetrators that I've mentioned, including psychopaths and narcissists. The object is the person, because people are objects. It's kind of a shorthand, a shortcut. Rather than place the individual on the shelf, which might prove a bit difficult logistically, let alone biologically, you place something that used to belong to the individual—could be a body part, in extreme cases.
Recently, a medical doctor has been caught in France, a pediatrician, and he has molested and mutilated and raped 299 children over a career spanning 25 years. And this medical doctor took notes of everything he has done meticulously. Another affair, also in France—I don't know what's happening over there—Ghislaine Maxwell; her husband drugged her and granted access to other men to her body, actually allowing him, allowing them to rape her while she was drugged, and he kept well over 1,000 videotapes of the proceedings. These videotapes, these meticulously maintained lists are mementos; they are trophies; they are the victims. It's not only a question of memory or reliving the experience or basking in the glory of the accomplishments or hoarding, um, kind of events; it's not only that. It's a way to capture the victim so that she doesn't go away. It's a way—accumulating these trophies and mementos is a way to cope with overwhelming separation anxiety, separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety. It's as if, if you're a sexual sadist, if you're a psychopath, if you're a narcissist, if you're a pedophile, if you're a serial killer, and you maltreated, abused, even killed a victim, and you take a trophy that used to belong to the victim, including possibly a body part, it's, it's as if that way you fixate the victim, you render the victim immobile and inert, unable to abandon you ever. It's a form of injection via projection. It's a—there's an external object that is then internalized and introjected as a representation of the totality of the victim, a synecdoche, as I mentioned.
Now, many of you would say, "But not all psychopaths are serial killers; not all narcissists are sexual sadists." I mean, what do you—why do you—why did you create this mixed list? People, many people, most people who are diagnosed as psychopaths don't, don't kill people; they don't rape people; they don't, you know, they just, they're just psychopaths. And most narcissists, actually the vast majority of narcissists, are not serial killers, and they're not sexual sadists, and they're just narcissists. They're just, you know, they do what narcissists do; they're being obnoxious and unempathetic, exploitative, and envious, and and so on. So why this mixed list? Because in all these cases—psychopaths, serial killers, pedophiles, sexual sadists, narcissists, and so on—there is a process of converting the victims from external objects into internal objects, often via the mediation and the agency of, of a something that used to belong to the victim, via a fetishistic, via fetishism, via a fetish. So a narcissist would convert an external object, a potential intimate partner, a potential source of narcissistic supply, a potential participant in the shared fantasy—a narcissist would convert the external object into an internal object, would inject the external object, create an avatar or a representation or a snapshot of the external object in his mind, and this internal object would acquire a life of its own, while the external object is rendered mute and mummified. So this is a process of snapshotting. The narcissist converts people out there, external, separate objects into internal objects, immersed, subsumed by his mind, figments of his imagination and cognitive processes. And all this is true, but narcissists often do this by using fetishes, by using objects that belong to the external objects. So by using objects that belong to the intimate partner, by using body parts, um, not necessarily detached from the from the victim, but they use fetishes as a bridge. The process of snapshotting is a process of fetishization, converting the external object into a fetish. Similarly, psychopaths, when they home in on, home in or zero in on a victim, they're goal-oriented; they want sex, they want money, they want power, they want control, they want—so they home in or zero in on a victim. When they do this, they would tend to interact with the victim via some kind of fetish, for example, money or status symbols or a trophy wife. So they would convert people around them into amalgams or assemblages of fetishes, fetish-like objects. This is, of course, the case with serial killers and sexual sadists who literally dismember victims and take parts, body parts as the as the representation of these victims in their lives. So they would decapitate people or otherwise dismember or eviscerate, like Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and so on, and they would use these as stand-in placeholders for the victims, but also as full-fledged representations of the victims. In many cases, the victims are dead, and the only thing that remains alive in the sexual killer's mind or the sexual sadist's mind is the body part or the trophy. Doesn't have to be a body part; could be a clothing, but it has to be something intimate—a piece of clothing, fashion accessory, a shoe, a necklace, something intimate, something that has been in touch with a victim's body and can serve as a synecdoche.
Of course, trophies and mementos serve to bridge the dissociative processes that underly many of these mental health, mental illnesses. These mental illnesses involve a lot of, a lot of dissociative memory gaps, um, blackouts, and so on and so forth. And the mementos and the trophies are the equivalence of confabulation in pathological narcissism. It's like if you have a memento or you have a trophy from the event, it's proof that the event has taken place, took place. It's like you don't remember it maybe, or you don't remember it clearly, or the whole thing is fuzzy and so on, but the, the memento or the trophy, the object or the body part, they are, they restore your reality testing; they, they restore your memory; they, they ground you. It's a grounding mechanism. By touching the body part or by touching the piece of clothing or by touching the, the fashion accessory, and they often touch these things; they often, um, play with them; they often unearth them and use them. And so there's a lot of tactile and olfactory and sensual interaction between these seriously mentally ill people and the trophies and mementos that they collect. And this interaction, which is direct, non-mediated, restores the sense of continuity of memory and therefore identity. Memento and trophy—proof that the event has taken place, substitute for memory, form of confabulation. Memory gap is bridged, however artificially and superciliously and superficially, it's bridged, and then there's a sense of personhood or a selfhood. Of course, when you make a list of all the children you have raped, when you videotape all the men who have raped your, your wife with your consent and collaboration and collusion, you're setting yourself up for failure. It's as if you're collecting the evidence against you, as if you are your own law enforcement, as if you, you are the police; you're doing the police work; you're doing the work of the police and the work of the prosecution because you, you provide them with meticulously arranged and ledged proof, evidence of your misdeeds and and crimes. Why do they do that? Because these people, of course, possess what metaphorically can be described as an internalized bad object. They are very self-punitive, self-hating, self-defeating, and self-destructive, as Hervey Cleckley observed about almost, almost 80 years ago, or more than 80 years ago. There's a lot of masochism involved. Sadism and masochism are flipsides of an identical coin, of a single coin. If you're a sadist, you're also a masochist in the vast majority of cases. And so there's a lot of, "I need to be punished; I'm a bad person; I'm evil; I'm wicked; I need to destroy myself before it's too late; I want to be captured," or I become so self-confident that I undermine myself; my self-confidence becomes weaponized against me. Sexual, the sexual predator, sexual sadist, they weaponize their self, their apparent self-confidence is actually a form of self-destructiveness; it's weaponized against them. And so there's a lot of self-punitive activity going on, and they maintain these records, knowing full well that one day all these proofs and evidence, pieces of evidence will come to light and doom them, doom them completely, and yet they compulsively continue to do this. It's the only way to take themselves down, to castigate and chastise themselves, to, to in a way do to themselves what they have done to the victim, to the victims.
Trophies and mementos are triggers; they trigger an addictive repetition compulsion. Now that's very difficult to understand, understand, but let me try, let me try a simile or an, an, an analogy. Um, a bottle, a bottle of alcohol, a bottle of an alcoholic drink would trigger an alcoholic to drink. When an alcoholic comes across an alcoholic drink, he finds the alcoholic drink, drink irresistible. This is known as cravings—irresistible. And then he drinks the alcoholic, the alcohol in the bottle triggers the alcoholic person to drink. Similarly, the mementos and the trophies trigger the sick individual to repeat the behavior; they create a repetition compulsion because the objects themselves and the collection, the process of collecting these objects is addictive, and it's addictive because the size and quality of the collection serve to self-enhance and regulate the sense of self-worth. It's a form of external regulation. It's as if, it's—it's take a serial killer, for example. The more trophies he has, the more trophies he has amassed over the years, and I'm saying "he" because the vast majority of serial killers are men. So the more trophies he has amassed over the years, the more confident, assertive, proud of himself he is. It's as if the trophies and mementos enhance his self-image and self-perception and self-confidence and self-esteem and regulate his sense of self-worth, stabilizing. We call this external regulation. Someone with a borderline personality disorder would use the intimate partner to regulate herself or himself, to regulate emotions, to stabilize labile moods and so on. It's not very different to a serial killer. The borderline personality regards intimate partners as kind of regulatory objects; they regard the intimate partner through the lens of what the intimate partner can do for them as far as regulation of internal processes go. The borderline outsources her mind to the intimate partner and uses the intimate, objectifies the intimate partner, uses the intimate partner as a kind of regulator. In future, probably artificial intelligence could play this role. It's not very different to a serial killer because in the serial killer's mind the same process happens, is happening. The serial killer objectifies the victim and then uses the victim as a form of regulator, uses the victim to buttress, for example, the sense of self-esteem. A serial killer is proud of how many people he or she, he has killed; he dwells, um, upon each and every detail of each and every murder. The sexual sadist would replay the acts in his mind time and again. A psychopath would brag about how many people he has exploited and abused and tortured and molested and worse. And the narcissist would regard the presence of a participant in the shared fantasy—could be an intimate partner or a best friend—he would regard this, their presence as a kind of acquisition. It's as if he has purchased slaves; it's a form of slavery, mental slavery, as if his intimate partner and his best friends and so on, they're slaves, and he owns them in a property ledger. He's converted them into objects that help the narcissist to regulate his sense of self-worth and other internal processes. You see, all these characters, they convert people into objects, and then they take away trophies and mementos, including body parts, in order to be in possession of these people that they have objectified and dehumanized.
Trophies and mementos also serve as learning materials. They remind these miscreants, these perpetrators, they remind them what they may have done wrong, and they hark back, they go back to these mementos and trophies in order to kind of rehash the experience, dissect it, analyze it, and learn from it, how to better, how to better repeat the same misconduct of deeds in the future with fewer chances of getting caught or with more excitement or with a higher level of thrill or with, um, better collaboration by the victim. So these are learning materials. Yeah, triggers; they trigger the behavior, but they also teach the perpetrators how to improve their performance, if you wish, how to polish it and shine it. You see, the trophies and mementos play a vital role in the psychic economy of narcissists, psychopaths, and the extreme cases of narcissism and psychopathy—serial killers, sexual sadists, pedophiles, people who commit incest, and so on. These are human trophies, and they correspond either to internal processes or to internal objects, and the whole action is internalized, not external, not externalized. So when a victim is mutilated or raped or murdered or worse or dismembered, at that point these processes take, take place internally. It's a re, it's an enactment in the real world of internal dynamics. And then when it's all over, there's a need to maintain a tenuous connection, some kind of bridge to reality, because these people are aware that their hold on reality is very compromised. They're terrified of themselves; they're terrified of their inability to function in the world and with other people. And so they need to confiscate, to appropriate from the victims some items, some elements, some body parts, so as to maintain this tenuous relationship with reality. It's the body part, the purse, the handkerchief, the scarf—they, they are the victim, and the victim is real; the victim is reality, stands for reality. It's a part of reality, and by owning the victim, however symbolically, these people remain, in their own diseased minds, grounded in reality, able to function in it and perhaps get away with it. Apropos the Zodiac.